Browse Promo

Browse Deals

Mirror Mirror

Melodramatic Popular Music

Spokane’s Mirror Mirror reminds me of getting lost in rural North Dakota. The roads are some of the straightest in the world, paved over the vast, empty prairie, and without a phone or map you could drive for days. Mirror Mirror’s Melodramatic Popular Music, a collection of the band’s recordings from 2008 to present, evokes this sense of being lost. The archetypical lo-fi shoegaze actually induces some anxiety in its minor keys and loose ends on songs like “U,” with vocals appearing like a loud whisper from down a hallway. “I lost all consciousness,” we hear on a track of the same name, and it feels like the sun is going down on an empty road.

The benefit to a retrospective album like this is that it shows lead man Jason Campbell’s growth and spectrum. A few tracks are demos lifted from 2013’s full-length Segments, which had a more pointed and upbeat direction and featured more singing. Some songs on Melodramatic come off sunnier than the rest, like “Legend in the House of Strangelove” and “I Won’t Breathe a Word.” But Mirror Mirror is at its best with tracks like “Strangers,” where bursts of creepy keys and fuzzed-out guitars swallow Campbell’s already indiscernible lyrics.